the gapanese invasion is nigh!

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

I Am Sam is a good drama created to try to inspire and induce change in its audience. This movie exhibits fatherly love eliciting human compassion to a love that is sustaining an indestructible spirit. This movie illustrates different-looking people and the situations they encounter in their modern day struggles we can all adapt and apply in our daily lives. Even though people usually view dramas as sad stories aimed to make us cry, the true goal of such movies does not usually finish when tears start flooding the audience’s eyes. Rather, it is something with a much deeper sense: to touch people’s lives enough for them to empathize with the characters. Ultimately, the producers of the movie are aimed at trying to make the audience better persons in their own little way by making them address sympathy concerns for certain individuals. This movie, for one, appeals to viewers that love is everything we humans need. In the case of Sam, it is sympathetic love, which he needs for people to see him in a different light—that handicapped persons like him are capable of love despite or precisely because of their imperfection. This movie is truly gives justice to those who are sympathetic of differently-abled people because good actors were chosen to play the different characters in the movie, a condition necessary for incredulous audience to be persuaded that while others may be different for their (lack of) intelligence, they deserve recognition for their capacity to love. These actors gave their respective roles the justice needed to bring the message across to the audience without that grim and determined effort. The three main actors embodied the characters by actually “being” and not just acting intertwined lives amid a non-empathic society. Sean Penn was luminous as Sam Dawson, the father whose imbecility causes him to lose custody of his daughter but proves the court that he can assume parental responsibility. For her part, Dakota Fanning was convincing as Lucy Dawson, the daughter who would be given to another family because her father, according to the court, is unfit to take care of her. Finally, Michelle Pfeiffer was brilliant as Rita Harrison, the hard-hitting lawyer of Sam with a divided family and a marriage on the rocks. It is amazing how each of them were able to make their respective characters become them during the film.But the best thing about this story is its fountainhead of life-altering lessons, most important of which is our necessity to feed on love. It shows us how seemingly inutile people like Sam encounter a lot of difficulties caused by our own judgments and stereotypes, without realizing that like anyone of us, he is capable of giving and receiving love. In the movie, Sam was separated from his 7-year-old daughter because discriminative people thought that differently-abled families are doomed to fail. While this is sometimes true, there are still some exceptions that prove us wrong, as is manifested in the movie. For example, Although Sam has an IQ only as high as that of his daughter, this did not stop him from loving her daughter wholeheartedly. Nothing stopped him from becoming the best father he can be. He strove to be the best—from earning from a more compensatory job to providing a bigger home for Lucy to sending his daughter to a better school—in order to provide everything that the court insists in order to get her daughter back. He kept on pushing the limits of his own self and his own approximations. As a result, he was able to show and convince his unsympathetic community of his capability as a loving father, something people around his social sphere are skeptical about only because his insufficient intellect does not warrant it. At the end of this film, the movie has completed its attempt to inspire sympathetic love in its viewers by showing that they only need a little care to understand that even handicaps can love like the rest of humankind. The question “Is love really all that matters?” can now be answered in relation to the situations presented in the movie. In the case of Sam, we can say that love is all that one needs to become a good parent. If the court became cognizant (that is, sympathetic, a characteristic rarely displayed by an impersonal institution such as the judiciary) of Sam’s potential for parental love, then it would discover that indeed, this father is capable of loving his daughter, however idiotic he may be. It is Sam’s society’s love that shall serve as his driving force for his fatherly love to reach its full momentum by winning custody of Lucy.I Am Sam is, indeed, a good drama movie not only because of its artistic and technical aspects but also because it succeeded in carrying across the inspirational message about an ever-loving father who is willing to beat himself to the extreme to keep his daughter to his side. This movie teaches us a lot about being human through compassion for a father and about the true meaning of love: intense, catalytic, sacrificing.

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Vicente L. Rafael’s Contracting Colonialism (Quezon City: Ateneo De Manila University Press, 2000) showcases conversion and translation of language and the whole Tagalog cultural systems during the early years of Hispanic conquest, around 1565 to 1760’s. Spain has conversion of the natives for the foremost project, but this unfurled into a full colonial system. Spanish did not bloom into a legitimate Philippine vernacular, so that communication between the colonizer and the colonial was based on Spanish-Tagalog translation. Through the book, Rafael shows the interrelationship among conversion, colonialism, and translation in the country and these concepts’ relevance during the historical location in question. He points out that translation delineates the bound of conversion to a significant proportion but in the process, the transmission of meaning provided a leeway for natives’ own interpretation.Rafael reads Hispanic missionary texts to assert that a successful conversation in Tagalog, according to the Spanish, necessitated the Tagalog language’s organization by developing a grammar and locating it in God’s hierarchy of languages, and using Spanish at the expense of baybayin, the native writing system supposed to be ambiguous. In translating, the ordering between Castillan and Tagalog was recognized but not fulfilling the missionaries’ holistic attempt at authority, since natives respond to “fished” Spanish words without them actually knowing what these meant. Rafael argues that colonial hierarchy and conversion were spawned by translation’s misreading by both parties. For instance, the “untranslatable” Espiritu Santo gets freely interpreted as pleased the natives, and when an inevitable error in Tagalog translation happened, the natives gets the probable upsetting of the colonizing missionaries’ agenda. The following chapters saw Rafael’s continued explication of many bizarre facets of Tagalog-Spanish ties employing mutually misread facts by means of translation overview of texts in both cultures’ language. In effect, the colonial hierarchy becomes set when Tagalog translation necessities occur.Contracting Colonialism depicts an order based on language issuing out of a colonial administration, relative to other colonial hierarchies from culture to politics. The role language assumes in a colonial mission is indispensable since the conquerors and the conquered must voice out their responses and aims, thus is translation’s necessity. Communication is tied up with language, so even as translation is defined in the book as something parallel to all culturally-assigned paradigms, linguistic translation is very important, hence tremendously stressed. The Spanish customized Tagalog to various proportions through grammar codification and promotion of its practice in order to foreground and regulate communication, but to no avail. The linguistic order stabilizes with translation and appropriation springing from the need for communication between the Spanish and the natives. Colonial power may be gleaned from this hierarchy and its formative nature is tantamount to the colonized people’s ability to circumvent this power with the utility of their original, non-stratified native tongue and its semantics. This linguistic order is an effect of and is used to disseminate the colonial system. The translation and language appropriation spawning the hierarchy are realized through various social forces—political, cultural, and religious—that push colonialism. The repetitive translation was needed in order to accomplish the colonial directive of Tagalogs’ conversion.To explain the bonds between colonialism, conversion and translation in the early colonial Philippines, Rafael browses through Christian text, language manuals, and secular letters authored by both Tagalogs and Spanish. His fundamental means of analysis is comprehensive, citing relatively scarce sources. In fairness to the examiner, texts from early colonial Philippine era are few, and while the author must have chosen to be silent about it, the heavy interpretation serves as an implication that the author decided rather than needed to do so. The author is greatly concerned with how texts function–a Tagalog grammar of Spanish is read primarily for its say on native Tagalog ideas about language for evidences to the means Tagalogs triumphantly disabled the havoc wrought by colonial signifiers, and analysis of the subjects integrated in the language manual are utilized to share points why Tagalogs received such grammar as an instrument of struggle. Rafael makes use of his analyses to exemplify a conclusion regarding the perception of Tagalogs and Spanish Christians on different cultural objects and their interaction via erroneous translation. Afterwards, he employs it as an explanation of some riddles in early colonial religious history and consequently sweeps to elaborate a portion of how the whole Spanish colonial apparatus in the archipelago gained notorious ground. This kind of method wants some belief on the part of the audience, but this proves to be full of incentive, nonetheless. The author’s analyses are riveting—to illustrate: he proceeds that unending Spaniards’ complaints of half-baked conversions by Tagalogs could be attributed to the natives’ notion of utang na loob, accepted by the Spaniards to be the translation of indebtedness to God, that in truth motivates scattered and incomplete debt repayment. These analyses, meanwhile, are somewhat unbelievable, since his interpretations seem fictionalized, without the persuasion that they are somehow operating within truth. While Contracting Colonialism is clever and possibly innovative and poignant, the book seems self-contained. Rafael seems to create the impression that the textual sources were heavily analyzed to be customized in a presupposed hypothesis than could be related or not at all with truth. Notwithstanding, the book is incandescent in its countering a narrative of universalizing by virtue of showing how the natives disarmed colonial apparatuses from boxing them up within the foreign norm and setting them in an unequal footing against the colonizers. While there are prevailing binaries that bring about religious and linguistic deformations wrought by colonial encounters, colonialism did not completely paralyzed the natives and could not be said to succeed in greatly permeating the native consciousness as to transmogrify the natives’ identity. The civilizing mission is not successful, but the colonial subjects are still humans, after all. The epistemic violence endured by colonials did not fully intrude to establish paradigmatic norms, as shown in the text at hand. Contracting colonialism is a brilliant illustration of socio-history of language in a context where parameters of language are inherently significant and fascinating and constructs an insight into the operations of colonialism at large. Likewise, it exhibits how linguistic origins, which often persist in the structure of living languages, can be effectively harnessed for historical interpretation. This review hopes to have shown that language is a matter to reckon with along with better known ones such as race and gender, and that its qualification as a historical artifact becomes an avenue to a fertile and progressive work. In some extent, the natives might have contracted colonialism, but not without showing to the colonizer, through language, the inscrutable people that they are.

Monday, January 29, 2007

The epic Iliad is replete with the exploits of mythical heroes whose deeds helped mold the Greek worldview and character. Homer’s long narrative poem on the Trojan War in Greece’s neighboring Asia Minor told not only the courage and dexterity of Greek and Trojan warriors but also their nobility and pride. These insights into the way of life, outlook and virtues of the ancient Greeks spoke of the social role heroes play as a symbol of national identity.The Homeric epic hero manifests three requisites in order to live up to one’s title, regardless of one’s superhuman and other physical qualities. First, one should resolve that warriors must stand together in battle. Whether winning or losing, the army should not appear divided, and each member as a hero must pursue that social alliance. Second, one must be concerned with one’s comrades. Before one thinks of oneself, one thinks more of the welfare of one’s people. Finally, one must avoid extreme brutality. The last requirement is deemed crucial for one to be a real epic hero, for a true one disapproves acts of ruthlessness, denigration and injustice. An epic hero understands that slaying an enemy must be enacted fast and that any mutilation reflects the savageness of the hero and the whole community. A hero, being practically spotless, becomes a national symbol for the society to emulate. This immaculate leader is the very epitome of how members of the society imagine themselves to be.More than his Greek counterpart Achilles, the Trojan Prince Hector is the embodiment of a true hero of the Iliad. Even as his hometown severely suffers as a consequence of the ongoing war between the Mycenaean Greeks and the citizens of Troy, Hector stands by his men in battles. Hector is fully aware of his accountabilities as his hometown’s great warrior. He understands that despite Troy’s destiny of falling into the hands of the invading Greeks, he will sustain the fight up to the bitter end. He recognizes that women and children abound behind the walls of his city, so he battles it out not only for his personal gain but also for his community’s glory. Likewise, defying his wife Andromache’s plea for him not to leave for the battle, Hector demonstrates the spirit of the Homeric hero with his justification. He said that while his family is his concern, he cannot just hide like a coward and resist fighting. That would give him shame toward facing the Trojans, and that would go against his nature of having trained to be in the frontline, hoping to reap glory.Also, the hero in Hector shows concern for his people. When Hector runs away from Achilles, he seems to have lost his pride and bravery. However, this defining moment concretizes the true epic hero that he is. Hector is aware that he is outmatched, so he flees in an attempt to attract Achilles into the territory of the Trojan army. He is being rational in that his fall in the hands of the enemy spells the fall of Troy. Instead of foolish pride, Hector chooses logic and runs not because he is a coward but because he cared more of his city, his people and his family. He cannot be dead, for a dead hero cannot help defend his nation. Finally, Hector did not show mercilessness or unfairness on the battlefield. Even as the idea of death for the opponents is a major concern for a nation at war, Hector articulates to Achilles his wish of being returned to Troy for proper burial in the event that he will emerge in the fight as a cold corpse. This implies that Hector himself will not find in his heart any reason to deny the same condition to Achilles should the latter gets killed. Hector must not demonstrate cruelty or injustice on the battleground because every fighter like himself deserves honor when he wins as well as when he loses.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Several films call attention to themselves and defy the purpose of simulating an illusion. Instead of consummately riveting the audience in the film, the audience becomes aware of the film, its work and its technology that are supposed to be concealed. These unconventional films, which employ methods that are associated with the reflexive style, include Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, Gary Ross’ Pleasantville, and Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr.One reflexive method that is prevalent in all films is the use of camera as one of the characters.In Rear Window, the invalid Jeff (James Stewart) plays a professional photographer who gets to use his camera as a way for the audience to see what goes on in the rear windows of the apartment opposite his. Also, the director’s camera plays a voyeur, much like the character Jeff and the audience peeking through the daily lives of a woman who practices alone for a date, a lady who dances all day long and who dates men simultaneously, a newly-wed couple on an all-day honeymoon, a couple who sleeps by the balcony owing to the hot weather, and a couple who splits on a murderous note. In Being John Malkovich, a magical portal accidentally discovered by Craig Schwartz becomes a camera through which the vision of John Malkovich (John Malkovich), a real-life actor, may be projected. The director’s camera makes the audience see what goes on in John Malkovich’s mind as well as his vision. In Pleasantville, the television powered by a strange remote control shows the life of the people of fictional Pleasantville, to which the twins David (Tobey Maguire) and Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) are transported and ultimately introduce a rainbow of emotions to the otherwise black-and-white boring community. The director’s camera takes the audience as witness of the chromatic transformation of Pleasantville. Lastly, the camera in Sherlock Jr. intersperses the silent film’s facts and fictions in such a manner that comedian Buster Keaton jumps onto the screen to become a legitimate part of the projected action. Keaton dreams of the case of his beloved’s missing watch, and follows it to reality onscreen.Another reflexive method used in all four films is the disregard for the plausible, with characters becoming part of the screen of the film within the film. In Rear Window, the voyeur Jeff becomes part of the “screen” he watches his neighbors through when the murderous husband confronts him inside his home and throws him out of the window. The place he just looks outside from—his screen—takes him in as one of the characters. In Being John Malkovich, the Schwartz couple (John Cusack and Cameron Diaz), some curious people baited by the enterprising puppeteer and John Malkovich himself all get to see the outside world from the screen of John Malkovich’ mind. The characters become John Malkovich for fifteen minutes, seeing the very things the actor does, from his naked body to a dinner date to a play dialogue he memorizes a dialogue from. In Pleasantville, the twins get trapped inside the black-and-white television, where they play the characters of the kids of the TV shows’ protagonist parents. They become black-and-white as well, until such time their liberated feeling of emotions colors the world of Pleasantville. In Sherlock Jr., a sleeping Keaton disgorges his spirit and, dreaming of the kidnapped beloved and the lost pearl necklace, leaps into the screen and turns into a film-inside-the-film character. Keaton experiences an ever changing backdrop from the ocean to the lion’s den to the desert until he becomes integral to the screen, purposed at saving his lady in distress.Being reflexive, all four films are not without references to other pieces of work. This only shows to what extent the film is conscious of itself as a work in relation to other masterpieces. For one, Rear Window is based on the short story of Cornell Woolrich entitled It Had to Be Murder. The murder the invalid believes has occurred in the film and which he would have the audience believe too is the referred murder in the short story. Meanwhile, Being John Malkovich, while a largely original work by the genius director, makes references to such works as Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard whose dialogue John Malkovich is recording when the fan who would be his girlfriend calls, and William Shakespeare’s Richard III which John Malkovich is rehearsing with other stage actors. Likewise, the puppet show Craig is performing onstreet where a furious father jabs at him alludes to the letters of Abelard and Heloise, a pre-medieval English tragic romance. On the other hand, Pleasantville is actually a black-and-white sitcom back in the 1950’s, which is itself based on works such as Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. Parts of the film like the court scene divided by colors and the destruction of nonconforming signs by the town mayor’s allies call to mind the racially-segregated court scene in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird and Bonfire of the Vanities, respectively. Finally, Sherlock Jr. is no doubt an allusion to the fictional Sherlock Holmes, the famous English detective. This is made more vivid by the film fact that Keaton, while working as a projectionist in the movie house, aspires to become a detective whose first case is the missing watch.There are many other intertextual proofs in the films which designate them as “conscious” films. They are meant to make us, the audience, aware that we are not mere spectators but characters too of the film by way of making us think, feel and see the way all the reflexive film characters do, be them the persons or the camera.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Not a few stories have characters whose acquisition of possessions generates changes in their personalities, often for the worse. Such is Ines Taccad Camayyo’s award-winning “People of Consequence,” which features the lives of a couple who, as they ascend up the social strata, manifests aggravation of characters.Both Camus and Meding are people of consequence: they pick up after their respective dealmakers. Camus worked first as a houseboy for a German landlord then as a street sweeper after an appointment by a town councilor. Meanwhile, his wife Meding served as a maid for the town mayor’s family. These connections to significant persons provide their juxtaposition as insignificant others—what wealth, power, connections and social position the German haciendero, the municipal councilor and the town mayor have, Camus and Meding lack.However, this poverty does not stop the couple from desiring to climb a notch higher up the social hierarchy. In fact, their impoverished condition becomes their driving force to rise out of obscurity and be their rural area’s most prominent citizens. In their barrio, Camus and Meding are “the only ones who had really known and lived with people of consequence” (p. 435); a quarter-century of intense industry and perseverance has them “becoming people of consequence” (p.435) themselves.Like the mythical Sisyphus written about by the existentialist writer from whom Camus’ name was inspired, he pushes his strength out to reach atop the mountain of social recognition (it is no accident that in his village at the foot of a tall cliff he and other men originally made a clearing out of, Camus turns out to “[own] the best house” (p. 435)—the highest-accorded, the highest-flying).Camus works hard not only as a chicken raiser but also as a fisherman like his father before him, only better positioned since he is touted to be intelligent and, therefore, meant for big things, as he claims his German landlord envisions of him whenever told to “aspire to go to Manila to study,…because he would then cultivate further the inclination and aptitude” (p. 439).He boasts of being the German’s confidante, and grows wistful each time the thought of being educated descends upon him—an inclination that remained over time despite the faded resolutions (p. 439). He feels he is “very much needed [by] and…useful (p. 438)” to people of relative importance, as when he dresses the chickens he has brought to the party-throwing Inspector as well as his German employer, notwithstanding an old crone’s ordering that dismays him (p. 438) and the aleman’s “punishments…for his own good” (p. 435). All these Camus has assimilated on his way to the top, to such ruinous proportion that “his stories of intimacy with the German master grew” (p. 439) and his lies await about “how pleased the good lady had been, how truly fine a gentleman the Superintendent was” (p. 442).The events may be conspiring to imply what Camus thinks of himself, but the illusion of self-importance is one symptom of the person of consequence Camus is turning to be.Camus’ wife Meding has the more excessive change in personality. She is the fiercer laborer of the couple: she works nonstop after having “learned the hard-driving manners of townsfolk” (p. 436), a suggestion that she should not stop short of getting to the privileged status of being a person of consequence. She crochets, peddles carabao milk, occasional fruits from the backyard and her husband’s catch, and doubles as a hard-hearted usurer. Her “determined self-denial” (p. 437) as a miser makes him “[know] her less and less” (p. 437). Also, she forces her husband to tap the necessary links for them to consummate their desire to improve their social position. For instance, she urges him to visit the superintendent, through whose influence the couple may be helped to gain more opportunity to leap away from the lower rung of the social ladder. He shows unspoken objections, but Meding “listened to him indifferently; already in her mind, she was counting the chickens which she must catch, tie up and cage in stripped baskets” (p. 441). Meding’s dream house they built for themselves is somewhat a dislocation in their barrio, for it seems built opposite the false modesty Camus tries to effect when the capacious residence becomes the center of talk. To him, Meding is “an ardent example of what hard work and frugality could bring” (p. 440). The radical changes in the wife show to what disastrous extent the necessity to enter a higher social level can get.An upward social mobility like that sought after by Camus and Meding is admirable to a point, but not to an excess. Their transmogrified personalities as they amass the necessary possessions to become people of consequence are a reminder that they strive way too hard to be accepted in a higher social status. They may absorb the lifestyle of their bosses in the long run, but it cannot be erased that Camus and his wife, being people of consequence, have at their own cost toiled as providers of the needs of a breed of people they can never truly belong to.

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Pagkahaba-haba man ng prusisyon, sa simbahan rin ang tuloy.” I repeatedly murmured that Filipino proverb on my way to Plaza San Ignacio where the play my class was required to watch and to base a reflective essay on would be staged. It was my first time in Intramuros, and while the twilight was rapidly giving in to the dark carpet of night time, I was hoping I would find the venue in no sooner moment without having to feel like a lost kid inside the mall. A few friendly exchanges with the Walled City’s modern-day guardia civiles led my church-going personal procession to an open air where men, women and children in Philippine national costumes walked unhurriedly while a choir serenaded them. Afterwards, three videos about the Philippines, the composite of Filipino people and the history of Intramuros were projected on a decaying wall. A little while and what proved to be a reenactment of the Spanish arrival in the archipelago transported everyone, including the audience, inside the Plaza ruins for “A Walk Back in Time.”I was thinking that with an interactive audience like that, the play would have us take part in such a historic, figurative walk. After all, the audience is comprised mostly by Filipinos, and students like me at that. It was not far from me that the experience would surely be a learning experience for all of us, so I kept in mind the basis for my meditation: cultural context in time. It helped that a young native boy acted as a story teller, who was quick to point out that he, along with other natives, was not a Filipino. The label referred to the second-class Spanish nationals born in the Islands, not unlike the well-heeled peninsulares born in mother Spain. Having known that, I thought of one of the titles given to Philippine National Hero Jose Rizal, who was alluded to as The First Filipino. He must have become the first one only when he was able to awaken the mass’ consciousness into fighting for colonial independence. It took The First Filipino three centuries to get the rightful title—that’s indeed a long procession.One cultural part of the play peeled after another like layers of a delicate flower, and as a Chinese, I took special interest in the portrayed development of the Chinese culture in the country. Tracing their humble beginnings literally from the streets where they sold their siopaos, pancits and chiongsams, they are now the Sys, the Gokongweis, the Tans, the Lims and other corporate giants. It was rather ironic that in their former historical location, the Chinese were sent compulsorily to the peripheral Parian, only to soar to the height of power when they amassed vast money through hard work and prudence. With the influence, we Chinese have become Filipinos too because not a few of us have found ourselves in many aspects of Philippine life from politics to religion to the academe. Like a procession ultimately leading to the church, we Chinese have arrived too.When the play showed the intermarriage of the natives and of the non-natives like the Chinese and the Spanish, it came to me that the mestizo culture answers why only the isolated Filipino minorities like the Aeta brothers can claim to being pure-blooded Filipinos. Our varying shades of brown and contaminated language betray us, for even then, one Pinoy may be darker or fairer in his brownness than another, and his Tagalog-based mother tongue has Spanish for ingredients. Three hundred years of colonization created an ever-mixed Filipino identity that has gotten this far, and the procession will still take a long way to go.Later in the play, the social divide between the educated class of the ilustrados and the popular class of the Katipuneros was blurred when the culture of the Filipinohood was born during the first nationwide Philippine Revolution. Both the ilustrados and the Katipuneros became aware of the need to be liberated from colonial oppression and sought for independence from Spain through diplomatic and armed means. The time was ripe for the Filipino culture to grow on its own, brutally interrupted by the arrival of the colonizers. The Filipino identity wills to assert itself however wounded it is.The way things are going now tell that the church sought after by the Filipino identity is still remote from sight, for the presence of colonization is invisible but felt like the wind. What is good is that the Filipino is still moving in order to gather, desperate as it seems, the identity that is lost in time. This walk back in time shows the length to which the Filipino has traveled thus far, hoping that however distant the Filipino procession gets, it will finally reach the church.